Undertake to move from this
tumble-down old house, strewn thick with the _debris_ of many
generations, into a tumble-up, peaky, perky, plastery, shingly, stary
new one, that is not half finished, and never will be, and good enough
for it, and you will perhaps comprehend how it is that I find a great
crack in my life. On the farther side are prosperity, science,
literature, philosophy, religion, society, all the refinements, and
amenities, and benevolences, and purities of life,--in short, all the
arts of peace, and civilization, and Christianity,--and on this
side--moving. You will also understand why that one word comprises, to
my thinking, all the discomforts short of absolute physical torture
that can be condensed into the human lot. Condensed, did I say? If it
were a condensed agony, I could endure it. One great, stunning,
overpowering blow is undoubtedly terrible, but you rally all your
fortitude to meet and resist it, and when it is over it is over and the
recuperative forces go to work; but a trouble that worries and baffles
and pricks and rasps you, that penetrates into all the ramifications of
your life, that fills you with profound disgust, and fires you with
irrepressible fury, and makes of you an Ishmaelite indeed, with your
hand against every man and every man's hand against you,--ah! that is
the _experimentum crucis_.
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